With 100% English Ancestry, I thought it might be really difficult to trace my ancestors back in England from Canada. Only my mother, her father and his mother were born in Canada. This Blog will talk about researching my English ancestors from Canada but also the ancestors of our son in law whose families stretch back far into Colonial French Canada. My one name study of Blake and of Pincombe also dominate my blog these days.

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Expansion of the Guild of One Name Studies

Now that this task of assembling the Blake marriages is in hand and really involves simple arithmetic in order to compile the table that I will use to graph the results, I must get back to transcribing wills for the Pincombe family and perhaps mix it in with continuing on the North Molton parish register transcription. There is always so much that I could be doing.

The Guild of one Name Studies is also occupying my thoughts at the moment and my thoughts on the need to advertise the Guild in ways other than Conferences. Canada is a huge country and we are spread out across this land mostly within 150 kilometres of the border we share with the United States. We are 34 million peoples with three main backgrounds: the First Peoples who are around 2-3 million of that population, those with French ancestry who are around 8-10 million of that population, those with primarily British Isles (including Ireland since it is technically part of the Isles known as the British Isles) ancestry who are around 14-16 million of that population (with the Irish and the Scot being quite substantial and in particular including those who have American ancestry in Colonial America) and the remaining 5-8 million with roots that stretch into Europe (both East and West), into Africa, into India, into China, into South West Asia and more currently Mexico and South America. How best to present the Guild to our diverse population? The intent is to grow the Guild and for my part to grow it so well that we can split my Eastern group into two - Ontario/Quebec and the Maritimes being the two groups. I would especially like to present the Guild to Quebec. Although the Guild is primarily a UK based organization, lately the thought is that we could expand around the world and in Canada that means making the Guild known to the large portion of our population that has French roots (as well as Scot and Irish since many Quebeckers descend from the early Irish and Scot migrants who settled in Quebec particularly because of their shared Roman Catholic heritage).

I am thinking of starting a one name study of the Dorris family who emigrated to Quebec from Garvagh, Ireland in 1834. James Dorris (46 years) and his wife Mary Dorris (30 years) are mentioned as coming in the following website:

I do not know if this is the correct family yet and I continue to work on this family line.No children are mentioned and I would be looking for a daughter Elisabeth born in the late 1820s or early 1830s who later married Didace Edouard Racine. Their daughter Anna married Joseph Jean Baptiste Chénier.

Such discussion always leads me to the thought that the world is best served if we think of ourselves as families rather than linguistic populations. Gradually our families will become more and more diverse - my husband's lines are like that with his very mixed European/British Isles ancestry which stretches all the way from the Scandinavian Peninsula to the Mediteranean Sea from the Atlantic Ocean to Eastern Europe. As he moves back in time his diversity increases rapidly. He belongs to all those different families and I think that the world's people will be better for it. For myself I continue to be all English thus far but I know that somewhere deep in my roots I am going to be also Scot and perhaps Irish and before that who knows but likely we were all huddled together in the Ice Age Retreats at Ukraina, Balkans and Iberia some 15,000 years ago before once again Homo sapiens expanded out across Europe, Asia and the Americas.

The suggestion is that we use Skype as a tool to reach genealogical societies and I like that idea. There are several genealogical societies in the Greater Ottawa/Gatineau areas locally that I could reach but my French skills are limited to carry on an entire presentation in French. I need to investigate my group locally to see if anyone has the skills to do that. The Maritimes also has a number of members and I need to approach one or two of them to see if they would speak about the Guild to their local genealogy groups.

Now that we have progressed to the idea of further advertising the Guild, I need to set aside time to work on the methodology. I will spend a bit of time preparing a YouTube video of my last talk to BIFHSGO on the Guild or GOONS as it is better known! The acronym is a catchy word and I always have it on my sign but do tend, as I have noticed, to use the word Guild when I am talking. I hadn't really realized that I did that until the discussion came up on the acronym on the Forum.

Dick Chandler (western Canadian Regional Representative) and I will work on a January newsletter for our Canadian group over the next couple of months.